Origins

Arthur L. Williams, Jr., is an insurance agent who turned into a billionaire insurance executive. He came up with the concept of Universal Life Insurance since he really did not like the whole life insurance product. He did not like them because of two reasons, one being that they lacked flexibility. When the Hong Kong or China policy owner was not in a position to make payments for the premium eg after retirement, he could not decrease the death benefit value, even though he did not need the same level of insurance coverage anymore. The second reason is that owners viewed the whole life insurance as a â€˜black boxâ€™ since it was not possible to see how it works. There were questions such as what are the annual expenses? Or what were the policy earnings and where did they go? These were common blind spots.